Because Netgear opted for hot-swappable bays, installing the hard drives is very quick and easy: simply remove each tray, secure the hard drive with four screws, and slip the drive inside its new home.

With your storage in place, you'll want to install the RAIDar software, which detects any Netgear NAS devices and allows the user to install firmware (supplied on a CD or downloaded from Netgear’s website).

The latest firmware available as I write this is RAIDiator 5.3.5 which brings about a number of fixes, though there are also still a few known limitations.

The RAIDar software will detect the ReadyNAS Duo v2 once you have installed it on the network and give you information such as MAC Address, Model, Host Name and IP Address. The ReadyNAS Duo v2 first installs firmware and then tests the hard drives. Once that is done the user can hit the setup button and begin configuration of the device.

The first menu allows the user to setup the storage volume using either the X-RAID2 expandable volume or what Netgear calls Flex-RAID, which is just standard RAID0, 1 or JDOB. For testing we tried both the standard RAID0 and X-RAID2 options.

Upon selecting a volume type a message appears notifying the user that it may take around an hour for the volume to be created and then several hours to perform a RAID sync in the background. Unfortunately there is no quick format option for those with new drives, which is really annoying. Back in the early days Synology did this as well, but eventually they added a quick setup option and it was much welcomed.

The annoying thing about this Netgear implementation is that there is no obvious indication of where the volume creating process is at. Once the user agrees on a volume that they would like to create, such as RAID0 for example, the software closes to the main windows and just says “Creating Volume”, with no indication of how long this will take or that percentage the process is up to.

However it is possible to access the RAIDiator 5 software using your default web browser and check the volume progress, it just took a little time for us to work this out. Once in the overview menu, which is a sub-menu of the system menu, the user will see a drop down titled volume.

By holding the mouse over the information icon a message box appears showing the RAID type, progress, speed and time left, which is very helpful. In the end our X-RAID2 setup took a little over 2 hours to configure, which is painfully slow for a 500GB capacity.

Overall the setup process was relatively straight forward, just be prepared to wait a few hours before getting started.